I Don't Do Sadness
by strayphoenix
Summary: The silence fills the kitchen like a tangible void. They'd always been the masters of silence, the two of them. They could go hours without talking, verbally or telepathically, and still be content with each other's existence in their same space. But that was a long time ago. Supermartian, post-breakup.


Conner still has nightmares.

Five years of freedom disappear the instant he closes his eyes and opens them again inside his Cadmus pod, paralyzed, unable to scream, to fight. Terrified, as always, that this is it. That he will never see the sky again. Dr. Desmond features prominently, pacing caustically outside either in his human form or as Blockbuster. Taking notes, jeering, his eyes always glowing red.

If he's a little luckier, he has nightmares of fighting Superman still. Of battling it out in space or in Metropolis. Of seeing if the Kryptonian bleeds green or crimson in his hands. The scary part isn't the gore or the brainwashing. It's how much Conner still feels like he _likes _it.

As of late though, all he nightmares of is M'gann. Specifically, of losing her. By explosion. By drowning. By suffocation in outer space.

By any way other than how he ultimately did.

Conner jolts awake from one such nightmare, his heartbeat is a rolling stampede in his ears. He wrestles with it for control of his superhearing, making absolutely sure that his startling awake was due solely to the terrors inside his mind and no exterior threat.

He sits up. The bed sheets stick to his bare skin and he pulls them off. The chill of the room is particularly brutal but he doesn't consider changing the temperature. Conner runs a hand through his bangs to get them out of his face and stares at a spot just over the doorway, breathing and blocking out the thoughts that will tether him to the land of the awake.

There's the soft _clack-clack _of nails on hard floor as Wolf makes his way to the bed from his dilapidated mess of tattered blankets and giant pillows in the corner. He's getting old by dog standards, and five years of Cobra-Venom has been taking its toll on his body, so he doesn't get there as fast as he used to.

But he does. He sets his muzzle over the side of the bed lethargically, nudging Conner's hand as he gazes up on him. He whimpers once. A question.

"Bad dreams, boy," he explains, scratching lightly behind his ears. Wolf holds his gaze, knowing more than a canine should. Crystal blue on crystal blue. He whines again.

"No," he tells Wolf, scowling, even as he lies, "not about her."

The lumbering canine doesn't seem convinced but doesn't press the issue. But he also doesn't return to his "pillow nest", as Wally had once deemed it. Instead Wolf steadily circles the bed. Conner hones in on the sound of the soft press of his paw pads into the hard floor the second before the _clack_ of nails.

Then Wolf jumps up onto the bed—which he knows isn't allowed—and settles down besides Conner on top of the sheets. Filling up and overflowing the side of the bed that used to be hers.

Conner glares and fists his hands tightly in the sheets.

Wolf is so much warmer than she ever was and the room is so much colder without her. He feels all at once the barrenness without her line of DVD sitcoms sitting side by side his biology and geology textbooks, without her pompoms on the closet floor, without her building card houses to hone her telekinesis with the baseball cards Clark had gotten him one Christmas, without her laughing along the borders of his mind on the other side of the room or the other side of the world.

For the first time since…_since_, the walls press in and Conner's claustrophobic in his own skin.

He kicks off the rest of the covers and decides he needs a snack. He doesn't bother with shoes or shirts or shorts at this hour. He's not sure he can risk going near the drawers anyway and accidentally finding a bookmark or a hairclip again in the state he's in.

"When I get back, you better be off," he warns Wolf distractedly.

The wolf peeks an eye open at him, watching him leave, before languidly sprawling out over the remainder of the mattress, content and snoring.

* * *

The first night they slept together, that is, in the same bed, was the night of the invasion.

After the Exercise, they hardly ever slept apart. After Halloween, very little sleeping got done all together.

But the first night was the night of the Reds, after she'd almost suffocated and he'd almost drowned.

The others never seemed to understand and if they did, never put as much weight to it. It was the Cave to them. Mount Justice. The Team's HQ.

But to them, it was their home. It was where they were supposed to feel safe on Earth, free to live as Earthlings did. It was where they had their memories and treasures and everything that homes should have.

The rest of the team could go home, to different lives and places that weren't such a target and a wreck.

But M'gann and Conner had to sleep in the ruins.

And not just the physical ones.

* * *

Conner's halfway down the hall when he realizes that the kitchen isn't the sanctuary he thought it'd be. The entire hall smells of sugar cookies. There's a rummaging sound, metal on metal, and muffled beneath the clatter—a steady heartbeat, a soft breathing. And he falters.

Intimacy has taught him how meaningfully she breathes. And only she would be up baking in the dead of night anyway.

Conner grits his teeth, because he is by no definition of the word a coward, and tells himself he can face her in person, alone, in the dark, even though he couldn't stand the space she left in his bed not five minutes ago. He keeps walking.

He promises himself a single glance on his way to get something strawberry flavored from the fridge and nothing more.

But a single glance is enough to stop him.

M'gann is half bent over the stove, her hands knitted daintily behind her back. Batter and sprinkles sit littered over the counter, a tray of colorfully decorated cookies already on the island. She's humming an easy tune, a somber melody that maybe should have been sung faster, as she inspects the tray in the oven telekinetically.

She looks like Marie Logan. She looks like Megan.

Her red hair drapes past her shoulders, creping along the sides of her face. He barely makes out the peachy human skin of her cheeks, the color stretching over her arms, visible under the short pink cardigan, between the end of her never hemmed skirt and the start of her white tube socks.

The half-tune melody clicks—it's the 'Hello Megan!' theme, sung at a quarter of its speed. They used to watch the whole season together once a year on Marie Logan's birthday.

Conner stares a minute too long, forgets himself to the wonder of seeing her like this again, and she finishes pulling the next plate of cookies from the oven, turning to set them on the island.

She jumps at the sight him. Everything about her jumps.

The tray clatters as her mind drops it on the island and a cookie bounces out. Her hair, spilling and dancing one second, jumps up to its pixie cut the next. Her flowing skirt, the blouse, vacuum seal themselves to her shape in her black uniform, complete with red X, and short impractical cape. Her skin tone plummets from soft pink to forest green. The transformation takes less than a second.

"Conner!" she says breathlessly and her eyes flick to the rogue cookie, catching it before it hits the soiled ground. The rapid fire of her heart almost drowns her voice out. "I didn't…I didn't hear you."

"I…wasn't thinking loud," he says, struggling for casual.

M'gann puts the lost cookie back in its place, gestures vaguely. Looking anywhere but at him. "I was doing some baking. Gar was having nightmares. They woke me up by accident."

"Oh," he says.

The kitchen grows insufferably quiet impossibly fast.

Conner makes the first move. He passes her to the fridge, fighting his compulsion to shift away. The strawberry ice cream is gone so he grabs whatever's left, pistachio, which he hates, and goes to serve himself some if only not to waste his trip to the kitchen. After a beat, he hears M'gann resume her bakery clatter.

She's not humming anymore.

* * *

After Black Canary cleared her from hyperthermia, the first thing M'gann did was check on the kitchen. The cupboards were blazed and ruined, the oven and fridge spluttering and broken, drowned along with her favorite cookbooks. She had to grip the island to keep herself on her feet. She can't remember how long she teetered there, crying.

How easily had she been ambushed because she was so blindly confident in the safety of her home?

How many mistakes could she make before some foe at last killed her or one of her friends?

And Conner hated himself, more than usual. He felt impotent that he'd been too infuriated at himself, at his lack of readiness, to protect M'gann the way he felt he was supposed to, now that he was her boyfriend.

He'd almost lost her twice in the span of a week to his own miscalculations. How would he live with himself if he lost her for good?

That night, lying in their separate beds, the floorboards warping, the carpets smelling of mildew, for the first time the mountain felt too empty, oppressing. Promising threats in every shadow.

Too large for just the two of them. Too much of a traitor.

* * *

The silence fills the kitchen like a tangible void.

They'd always been the masters of silence, the two of them. Wally was a one man band and Robin's cackle was a firework and Artemis fought fiercely with her words. Yet Conner and M'gann could go hours without talking, verbally or telepathically, and still be content with each other's existence in their same space.

But that was a long time ago, and Conner already had Atlas-severe back problems without the smothering quiet threatening to break him.

"Would you like a cookie?"

Conner looks up from rinsing at her breach of solace. He raises a brow and hopes the expression conveys less chalance than his voice would've if he'd tried to use it.

M'gann looks at the third and fourth trays of cookies she's pulling out of the oven, setting one down and tilting the other to slide the naked cookies onto a plate beside their kaleidoscope colored brothers without physically touching either tray. She sounds almost clinical as she explains, "I was just baking for the sake of baking. And Gar really shouldn't have all of these. Too many are bad for his health."

He can't remember the last time she baked something just for him.

"…I shouldn't," he says simply. The two words imply everything he knows he doesn't have in him to say to her. He turns to put the rag back and head for the door.

He hears her swallow without seeing it. "I understand."

He hates the way his heart hitches on her words, a paper bag under car tires. He hates the resigned solitude that dances along the edges of her voice that only super hearing would catch. And Conner knows from years of experience when to admit he's a goner.

Despite the history, the months and the bedrooms in between them now, he breathes bracingly and turns back to the refrigerator.

Conner walks the gallon of two percent milk and two striped glasses to the counter seating as M'gann floats a large plastic container over and slides the dozens of colorfully decorated cookies into it, sealing it for morning. He's just finished pouring the second glass of milk when a porcelain plate of undecorated cookies lands with a gentle clink on the marble counter in between his seat and the next which M'gann proceeds to then, very bravely, occupy.

With her mind, she slides the second glass over and sips at it as Conner takes first bite of the cookies.

They make it through four cookies a piece, a quarter of their milk, and exactly zero sidelong glances before Conner decides on the appropriate intonation to ask, "New recipe?"

M'gann nods. "Extra vanilla. Gar's allergic to peanut oil."

"Funny for a guy that can turn into an elephant."

The corner of her mouth tilts up so minimally, if he didn't know better, he would call it a side effect of her milk sipping. But he does know better, and it only makes his stomach lurch.

But her lips sober up, rounding around her next cookie.

"He was having my nightmares again," she says. "The…White Martian ones."

Conner chews pensively. He knows all about her White Martian nightmares. He'd pried her awake from plenty of them, held her in his arms as she shook and sobbed in the aftermath. Memories of her horrible childhood on Mars, picked on and beaten up and treated like trash. Twisted visions of her paranoia: of her friends burning her at the stake, of Conner abandoning her in the night. And since the blood transfusion that had saved his life and given him his powers, Gar had taken some of M'gann more horrific memories as a side dish.

"So you thought you'd make it up to him by baking."

M'gann shrugs almost unnoticeably. "With Gar, pretty much anything is forgiven with cookies. I guess in that way, he's a lot like L'gann…"

The cookie in his hands crumbles under Conner's strength.

Conner had been wrong. He was a coward. He wasn't ready for this. Not by a long shot.

* * *

He'd knocked on her door at three in the morning, just above the water mark two inches above his head. The League was supposed to arrive at six to begin repairs.

Conner asked, telepathically, out of courtesy, if she was awake. If it was okay if he could come in.

He didn't have to tell her he was just in the middle of a nightmare, the Reds in place of Blockbuster, as he broke his fists against the inside of his glass pod as the robots murdered his friends one by one, saving the girl he loved for last.

She didn't have to tell him she was terrified of being alone, that she was still too warm, that the mountain and the guilt were just too big and he too far away in case anything happened.

So she said sure and unlocked the door without lifting a finger. She scooted over and he apologized for any dents in the mattress he might leave. He lay down on top of the sheets next to her and didn't expect M'gann to immediately fit herself against his side. She did it so softly, so easily; he thought for sure she must have shape shifted to manage it.

She was wearing a white silky nightdress that felt just like her skin under his doodling fingers and against his side. He wondered if she couldn't shape shift herself out of her scent because her hair still smelled like ash and sweat and fire.

* * *

M'gann's eyes flick up to him when he pushes his stool out to leave, grinding out the quiet.

"Don't go," she says right away. Too fast, too sharp. There's no taking it back.

Conner shoves the stool back in. "I'm tired."

"You're lying."

His bridled temper bucks inside his chest, unapologetic and vicious and threatening to break the already flimsy control he has of the situation.

"I am," he says, chugging the rest of his milk as he stalks the glass to the sink.

She sounds less aggressive at the admission, if still angry. Her eyes are practically electric. "I wish you wouldn't get so mad just because I bring him up."

The thundering of the sinkish water does wonders drowning out her voice, if not his subtle rage. The glass clatters as he opens the washing machine and tosses it in.

"I'm not mad," he lies, heading towards the door. "You _know _my mad."

In a disarmed whisper that might have wanted to be just a thought, she says, "I don't know anything about you anymore, Conner."

Silence follows him as he crosses the kitchen, past her batter bowl and cookie sheets and the smell that drives him crazy with memories, but he doesn't stop. Doesn't turn or hesitate because he's too stupid and too heartbroken and she's still everything he loved about her.

"Thanks for the cookies," he says.

Wolf is too hot and the bed is too hot and the air he manages to force into his lungs is burning. But Conner gets on his covers anyway and closes his eyes tight. Fighting to fall asleep to the nightmares that are paranoia and regret but still beat the reality of M'gann in the kitchen down the hall, her tear drops car crashes in the rain.

He feels Wolf's chin on his hip. Breathing deep and even, half asleep.

Conner spends the hours before submission pushing cookie crumbs out of his molars with his tongue.

* * *

They didn't sleep for hours.

The League was there on time of course, moving debris, planning for reconstruction. But no one bothered them. They laid awake, tucked together, content with their minds humming alive against each other, tumbling through anxieties and stress despite the physical company.

When it became clear that worry would bring them no rest, Conner thought to scrounge for his handful of happy memories and wishful dreams, hoping maybe to lull her to sleep with them. Seeing the moon for the first time. The realization in Belle Rev talking to Icicle Jr, like a nuke going off in his chest. One day learning to fly. Outracing the sun.

M'gann smiled and wordlessly, reciprocated with her own memories of coming to Earth, her own dreams of things to see yet on their strange alien planet. Emerging from the bioship to redwoods tall as the sky. Images of cities above ground brighter than stars. Oceans as blue as his eyes.

Conner fell asleep before she did; to the quietest, most vividly colored impressionist dream he'd ever had before or since.

It wasn't until morning that she explained to him how Martians kissed with memories.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** A birthday gift for Ms. **Satellites on Parade. **The song "I Don't Do Sadness / Blue Wind_" _is from the musical _Spring Awakening._


End file.
